June 04, 2010

WhileKal Penn and Aziz Ansari have paved the way for South
Asian funny guys, a full cast from the subcontinent are just now making their
way to the small screen in NBC Thursday’s new sitcom, “Outsourced”.

A spin-off of the 2006 movie by the same name, the plot
follows a jaded salesman, Todd (Ben Rappaport), to India to oversee a call
center.

If the movie is indeed a taste-test, “Outsourced” promises
to channel a stereotype into a subtle, lively storyline complete with romance
and cultural commentary.

“Outsourced” bumped out “Parks and Recreation” (starring Ansari) for the
Thursday evening spot at 9:30, although that doc-style comedy is only on hold,
not canceled. NBC is adding five new comedies and seven new dramas to their
line-up, according to the NBC website.

March 17, 2009

Journalists from across all services of the BBC have resolved to hold two one-day strikes next month, prompted in large part by plans to "offshore" operations for the BBC World Service's Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu programming to Delhi, Kathmandu, and Islamabad. From the Guardian:

TV, radio and online news will be disrupted on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April after nearly 800 members of the National Union of Journalists chapel at the BBC today voted in favour of industrial action in a national ballot.

More than 1,100 of the union's nearly 4,000 members at the corporation took part in the vote, 77% of whom voted in favour of a strike.

The most urgent threat of compulsory cuts is at the World Service's South Asian section, where up to 20 members are at risk, the union has said. Staff in Scotland are also understood to be under threat.

The NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said: "Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs ... now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them." [link]

Staff are concerned that moving production of these BBC language services abroad will result in poorer output and a loss of independence which is integral to the BBC World Service.

One member commented: “If the BBC’s succeeds in imposing change, the tendency will be for the output to become more and more India-centric, in the case of the India service, as they try to compete with local FM broadcasters.

“This moves away from the World Service’s USP: impartial news with a global perspective. Why should the British taxpayer end up paying for a local Indian radio station?” [link]

The International Federation of Journalists has echoed these concerns, asserting that "the BBC management's off-shoring plans will put at risk seventy years of first-class journalism and expose their journalists to political and commercial pressures beyond their control." On the eve of last month's one-day strike, John McDonnell, a Labour MP for west London, elaborated upon these concerns even further:

March 12, 2009

On January 27, 2009, the South Asian Journalists
Association, The Southern Asian Institute and The New York Press Club co-hosted
a debate on editorial outsourcing to India. "Outsourcing News:
Boon or Boondoggle" brought together panelists who supported and
opposed the growing trend of shifting media jobs to India.

James Macpherson, one of the panelists and publisher of
PasadenaNow.com, made headlines for his website’s use of India-based journalists.
In November, Maureen Dowd profiled him in an article titled, “A Penny for my
thoughts?” and in 2007 over 30 major publications covered his decision to begin
hiring journalists in India
to cover Pasadena city council meetings via webcast. Macpherson was joined by other panelists
Robert Berkeley, CEO of Express KCS and Tony Joseph, CEO of Mindworks Global.
Express KCS and Mindworks Global provide editorial production services from India to media
companies around the world.

On the opposing side, it was panelist Anthony Ramirez, a
19-year New York Times veteran that
was most vocal about his enmity to editorial outsourcing, who referred to
Macpherson and the other panelists as, “Lucifer and his minions.” Bruce
Lambert, 21-year Times veteran and
Phil Pilato, editor and news writer for 1010 WINS radio also sat by side in
opposition to the idea.

I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.

“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”

October 12, 2008

After years of filming scenes in New York, Bollywood is now outsourcing. According to a Greater Philadelphia Film Office spokesperson, an Indian film production team is currently using Philadelphia as a "stunt double" for a film set in the Big Apple:

The winner here, she says, is the city's economy:

"We're able to provide them with an American big city location that
doubles very well for New York at a lower price. They're using local
resources and paying for them and staying in local hotels and spending
quite a lot of money here." [link]

While the Film Office has been mostly hush-hush about the film's details to avoid a "paparazzi blitz," the secret seems not all that carefully guarded. The film is an action flick starring John Abraham, Katrina Kaif, and Neil Nitin Mukesh, and its highly creative working title is "New York." Although production began in August, the Film Office only this week revealed word of the film's shooting in an effort to prevent the public from going on red alert over the dramatic scenes being shot over the weekend:

If you're walking in Center City this weekend, near 16th and Market
streets, don't mind the FBI helicopters overhead or the sounds of
gunfire.

"Don't be concerned, it's just a movie," said Sharon Pinkenson, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office....

September 06, 2008

The outsourcing of information-technology work is on the rise. But
that doesn’t mean that American tech workers will soon lose their jobs:
Businesses are increasingly handing work to firms in the U.S.

Businesses are doing their outsourcing Dylan-style

That’s one of the findings in the Black Book of Outsourcing,
a comprehensive survey of outsourcing practices at 5,000 businesses by
Scott Wilson and Doug Brown. For years, the conventional wisdom about
outsourcing has been that businesses try to cut costs by sending tech
work that used to be done by in-house staffers to firms in lower-wage
countries, principally India. But businesses are becoming frustrated
with so-called offshore outsourcing, according to the survey. While 82%
of businesses surveyed said they were satisfied with “sameshore”
outsourcing (the industry has adopted several absurd terms to describe
where work is done in the wake of the offshore boom ) only 33% were
satisfied with offshore efforts.

“A lot of folks were comfortable taking the work to India, but it
turns out they’re even more comfortable taking the work back,” Wilson
tells the Business Technology Blog.

That doesn’t mean businesses will start sending more work to
outsourcing companies based in the U.S., however. Instead, the desire
to have work performed closer to home, which is largely attributable to
the need to communicate with the people doing the work, has led to what
Wilson calls “reverse outsourcing” – companies based in India opening
up offices in the U.S.

A company that runs one of the nation’s largest networks of online
schools recently decided to discontinue a program that arranged for
high school teachers in the United States to send their students’
English essays to India for evaluations by reviewers there.

July 14, 2008

Ashish Kumar Sen, a DC-based contributor to Outlook magazine, in India, scored a lengthy interview with Barack Obama, the first for any South Asian media outlet. I would have asked him how he did it but fortunately he's written a separate piece, "How I Chased Obama."

Allow us to reproduce an excerpt:

What began as a shot in the dark was to
soon become an obsession for me. Perhaps it was because I was witness
to the Obama mania sweeping America. To watch him campaign during those
months was akin to experiencing a rock star inspire millions to dance
to his tunes of hope. "Yes, we can"—his campaign slogan read. These
simple words, transposed to my very specific situation, suddenly
started making a lot of sense.

But before the Obama interview became a bee
that wouldn’t stop buzzing in my head, things were already in motion. I
called an Illinois-based friend and supporter of Obama who put me in
touch with a campaign advisor. She promised to forward my request with
a strong recommendation. My selling point: "Outlook may not be distributed in the US, but our website is the gateway to India for expat Indians living in the US."

Three weeks later, I received a call from
the Obama advisor. Could I submit a sample of the questions I wished to
ask Obama? I did. Days later, in mid-March, I received yet another call
from the advisor. What’s your last deadline? "Wednesday," I said,
excited. I drew my own conclusions: nobody asks for your deadline
unless...

The interview appears to have been conducted by email, and touched upon issues ranging from the nuclear deal - Obama says he's "reluctant to seek changes" - to the irreversibility of outsourcing, to the Islamic world:

If I go to a poor country and speak about
both the US obligation to work with poor countries to relieve
suffering, and also the responsibility of poor countries to clear up
corruption and increase transparency and rule of law and build their
civil service, I do so with the credibility of someone with a
grandmother who lives in an impoverished village in Africa.

January 31, 2008

The Internet feels elemental, omnipresent. It is easy to forget that there is a physical
reality to it until something mundane but hugely disruptive happens.

On Wednesday an Indian-owned cable in the Mediterranean Sea,
just off the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, was damaged by an unknown cause
and millions of Internet users across the Middle East and South Asia were
affected. More from Reuters:

"India also reported serious disruptions to its services and Rajesh
Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of
India, told Reuters: "There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in
bandwidth."

"Chharia told the Headlines Today news channel that a "degraded"
service would be up and running by Wednesday night, but full
restoration would take 10 to 15 days."

According to The Guardian,
the enormous cable runs from Germany all the way to Australia and Japan. At
Palermo, Italy, it becomes a submarine cable and reemerges at Alexandria. The
Economic Timesreports that the cable is the FLAG cable, which is owned by Reliance. (Incidentally, if it
is the FLAG then The Guardian has its geography slightly wrong - see this map of the cable's transcontinental route)

"Ford spokesman Jay Ward in London would not say how much Tata bid for
the automakers, nor would he say if two other bidders, Indian automaker
Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. and U.S. private equity firm One Equity
Partners LLC, still were in the running. Last month people close to the
negotiations with Ford told the AP that potential suitors had submitted
bids for both companies that ranged from $1.5 billion to $2 billion."

When Ratan Tata visited the home of the designer Ralph Lauren
last autumn, the two auto enthusiasts spent much of their time in the
garage, admiring Mr. Lauren’s extensive car collection, including the
Batmobile-esque 1955 Jaguar XKD.

Now Mr. Tata is poised to take over Jaguar itself.

And it called Tata the most unlikely of corporate titans.

... almost
preternaturally humble, unabashedly open about the company’s mistakes
and about the fact that he never really wanted to be an industrialist
in the first place. He studied architecture at Cornell University,
and after decades of working for the family business, he says he is
even considering opening a small architecture firm when he retires.
Never married, he lavishes attention on his dogs, writes thank-you
notes to employees who do him favors, and is often spied on Sundays
driving alone on Marine Drive in Mumbai in one of the several cars he
owns.

Meanwhile, Tata's rupees one lakh car has been getting a lot of talk. The Economic Times in India called it "Power to the People."

Some say it will be called 'Jeh' (the first three letters of Jehangir RD Tata's name) but there is another school that seems to suggest it will be called 'Miracle'. But the names aren't important. What is important is that Tata's People's Car will change the Indian transportation scenario as decisively as Maruti 800 did in 1984.

This car looks a lot like the European Smart Car, at least from this illustration by Muntaser Mirkar.